Forward Deployed Engineer

Generalist • Somerville, MA

4d • $150,000 - $200,000

About The Position

Generalist is building AI that enables robots to do useful work in the physical world. The Forward Deployed Engineer turns that technology into working customer deployments, owning engineering from understanding workflows and designing integrations through deploying software, debugging robot behavior, and helping customers get started.

As one of Generalist’s first Forward Deployed Engineers, this person will deliver early deployments and help establish the function. They will shape how the team scopes technical work, measures success, diagnoses failures, and converts customer experience into shared tools and practices.

This is a hands-on, cross-functional engineering role involving code development, robot hardware, customer systems, and collaboration with research, engineering, operations, and partnerships teams. The engineer moves between customer conversations, system design, and debugging, maintaining accountability until systems work in practice.

Requirements

• Have built and shipped production software and be able to independently take a technical problem from an ambiguous requirement to a tested, working solution.
• Have strong software engineering fundamentals and experience designing integrations across APIs, services, or complex systems; be able to explain design choices and reason through failure modes.
• Debug methodically by establishing expected behavior, gathering evidence, testing hypotheses, and verifying that fixes address underlying problems.
• Enjoy working directly with customers and users, asking effective questions, translating needs into engineering work, and clearly explaining complex issues without overpromising.
• Learn unfamiliar technical domains quickly and demonstrate curiosity about machine learning, robotics, and the challenge of reliable real-world operation.
• Take ownership in an early-stage environment, create structure where needed, and balance immediate customer needs with improvements for future deployments.
• Be excited to work hands-on with robots and customer teams, including spending time at customer sites.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in robotics, machine learning, or deploying complex software in customer environments.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical delivery of customer deployments, from understanding requirements and defining success criteria through integration, software rollout, onboarding, live field debugging, and ongoing improvement.
• Design and build reliable, maintainable software integrations connecting Generalist’s systems with customer APIs, applications, and workflows.
• Design robot tasks and evaluation workflows, examine rollout data, and refine tasks when real-world performance falls short of expectations.
• Debug software, integrations, robot behavior, and operating environments using logs, observations, and focused experiments; implement fixes and verify results.
• Work directly with customers to understand constraints, explain technical tradeoffs, and communicate progress clearly; involve specialists when needed while retaining ownership of outcomes.
• Turn deployment experience into reusable tooling, documentation, diagnostics, playbooks, and proposed system improvements that make future deployments easier and more reliable.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Education Level: No Education Listed